> @sophlogimo said: > lordsteve1 wrote: » > > Well I got one cannot partake in this test. I have no slots for new toons and im sure as hell not deleting one or buying a slot. [...] > > > > > Maybe you can afford an email address to create a new account. But then again, these things are expensive.
NO.
Look buddy, If YOU want to create a revolution in how players measure performance and get us all using some fancy new solo parsing map to give data to compare then YOU need to come up with the goods.
Thus far all you’ve done is whinge about gear and parses and skill not being important and demanding we all go and make new characters or accounts to test out a theory. You’ve not even attempted to find a common ground we can all agree on or use for what you wish.
So how about you cut the nonsense and just listen the the players posting here who undersysnd the game mechanics and are at the top 1% of the skill tree. Those guys are telling you what you are asking for here if you take your head out of you TRIBBLE to actually listen.
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If I give you my paypal, will you send me 10€ necessary to buy zen (smallest amount possible, afaik) to unlock new character slot?
I'd pay for that slot for you if I thought it would it help make the OP understand the difference between gear and skill. Or just for the fun of letting you embarrass him elsewhere other than on the forums.
Hello rubber banding my old friend, time to bounce around the battlezone again, where are all my bug reports going?, out of love with this game I am falling, As Cryptic fail to acknowledge a problem exists, Shakes an angry fist, And from Support all I'm hearing are the sounds of silence.
Why don't you guys just do this on Tribble? it IS the Test server after all
the character slot thing wouldn't be an issue there
or is Tribble still restricted in some way I'm not aware of?
Or you could do what dozens of us have already done, run content, log your parses, mine the data, and then re-run. Unless you're being intentionally bad you will absolutely have the empirical evidence that shows you making gains that have no relation to your equipment, and, if you spend enough time doing it, you'll account for the variables between runs in terms of other players.
This whole exercise of yours is obtuse. The evidence is already there. Anyone that has made the dps or elite content climb has gone through this already, and seen how much of their gains come from nothing but learning to fly, learning to trigger abilities at optimal times, and learning to quit making excuses for the personal human variable. In other words, you can actually track your improvements based purely on developing skill.
In turn, that knowledge gained has been freely shared and offered, with entire websites and reddit subs dedicated to helping people move up that climb a bit easier. It sure helped me over the past year of climbing, and anecdotally, one of the very first things I was told was the gear was secondary to learning how to pilot. True then, true now.
If you'd spend as much time actually doing it, instead of whinging on the forums about it, you'd already have all the data you need.
I predict massive differences in performance between players with identical gear. Gear is much much less important than skill.
Interesting. My first thought was that with everyone using such a basic build with fewer degrees of piloting discretion and fewer things to manage, "piloting skill" would have diminishing returns on such a build and the dps curve (x-axis = "piloting skill" and y-axis = dps) would flatten rather quickly such that there would be smaller differences between people above a certain inflection point.
While you'd need everyone to have the same build, there needs to be sufficient complexity to discriminate. True, one might argue that since it's a percentage, it might work. But, that assumes a linear correlation that I'm not sure exists.
You've nailed it. soph's trying to stack the deck by minimizing complexity, which would be fine in other circumstances, but he intends to make a point about the performance disparity in end-game PvE. (A note to the moderator who said this thread has gone downhill quickly: it already went downhill. This is a continuation of soph's performance in another thread.)
If we're all playing with the same crippled boff loadout and (lack of) CDR management tools, then the skill gap will be restricted severely, whereas in end-game queues the performance ceiling skyrockets for someone who knows how to take full advantage of ability synergies, manage cooldowns, etc. A less experienced or skilled player will lag a great deal in comparison, even if he has exactly the same end-game build.
This is why I often see people in builds that are capable of 100k+ struggle to hit 20k. There's nothing wrong with those people; they can learn, but the game teaches them nothing, and there's an enormous complexity increase at the end of the leveling progression.
Likewise, the importance of positioning is diminished on a build that has no coherent weapon scheme. In an end-game context, good players separate themselves by maintaining a higher firing time on target. Cryptic's default weapon loadouts exist to show the player what's equippable, not to show him how to play. Where do you even begin to find optimal positioning for a build that mixes two torps (fore and aft), regular beam arrays, and dual cannons? Presumably you're just supposed to fly in circles in the hope that all of your weapons get their turn to attack.
If you want to make a canon build mixing cannons, a torp, and omni arrays, I can do that for you, and it'll perform extremely well, but this? This is just wanton self-gimping.
The funny part is that some of us might be inclined to play along with soph's little experiment, if he'd shown the slightest bit of willingness to meet us halfway: after spending page after page whining that people's ISA scores are too high (and arguing for a DPS cap), he refused to even run the map once himself for comparison purposes. Thus he's comparing his own performance to a bunch of other people's scores in a different context, and using that uninformed comparison to argue for wholesale changes to the game. Remember his refusal to run a 3-minute parse the next time he complains that people are making excuses for not running his dopey little test, which features all sorts of benchmarking no-nos like high travel time and enemies that can be one-shot.
In any case, as you can see when he asks us to "just beat his score," this testing scheme isn't an attempt at empirical purity; this is about him, proving that the elitist DPSers aren't that much better than he is. Of course if he just posted his build in the appropriate channels and/or asked for help with his keybinds/ability rotations/positioning, then any number of us would be happy to help. But he doesn't want to get better; he wants to tear everyone else down instead.
So, we have basically 2 data points up to now. I believe more, say at least two dozen, would be helpful.
Wrong. There are 15,405 data points available. They are just in a different pool you think you're too special to play in. It's called ISA, I know you've heard of it. Funny thing is, there's lots of data there you can compare to.
No, not at all. Considering that the above numbers are mathematically impossible under the conditions given in the OP, the pattern seems to be "people who want to avoid the gathering of useful data by destroying the thread with all kinds of nonsense".
Now, one could think about why people would want to do that? Especially people who supposedly are really, really good players and know all about the game.
After all, such people should have the most interest in gathering good data, to prove their point.
The point has already been proven, thousands of times. But no, everyone should snap to attention to prove themselves to random disgruntled internet poster sophlogimo. The existing benchmarks aren't good enough! Let's instead do this completely unvetted tutorial mission that eliminates 2/3rds of the game's complexity! The arrogance is stunning.
And LOL at having a tantrum over my obvious joke with the numbers. This is all you did in the other thread - ignoring any substantive argument, either taking words out of context to make yourself look better, or whining that you're being victimized. We've all tried being nice to you, to no avail - but it is kind of you to prove my point, in this latest post, by detailing all of your insecurities and resentments with respect to DPSers in STO. "Domination games," hahaha, seriously?
Why don't you answer Jay's post (@alcaatraz)? That dude's forgotten more than you'll ever know about STO's mechanics, and in both threads he's approached you with an unfailingly polite and reasonable tone. He's willing to discuss the merits of your proposed test in a constructive way, but that's not good enough, apparently. No, the narrative is ISA bad, and anything soph proposes off the cuff is good. (Remember, your original proposal was a Delta Quadrant patrol, but that doesn't work for newbie Jem toons, so the tutorial it is! So so much thought you've put into this.)
people who claim "It's skill, not gear" are just as wrong as the people who claim the opposite.
Of course, but no one is claiming that.
Obviously Gear is a big part of it, otherwise we wouldn't be dumping all our resources into getting Mark XV Gold items, lock box ships, lobi gear, expensive traits, etc.
Gear is obviously a part of it, a big part of it.. it's just not the only part.
Except for people like Spencer and Felisean, who can wring out 200K DPS using only Warp Core Breach, I think it's reasonable to say that the people who claim "It's skill, not gear" are just as wrong as the people who claim the opposite.
Seems like it's not that either group is "wrong" as such. Rather, the answer more likely varies. At lower dps (let's say for illustrative purposes less than 20K), equipment matters more than skill - as I hypothesized earlier, less skill-based performance discrimination potential. At higher dps (Illustrative: 120K+), top gear is a given, so skill becomes the key differentiator that drives differences between 200K and 150K and 120K. It probably looks more like a rectangle cut from bottom left to top right corners with the left side equipment-dps and the right side skill-dps.
Here, I'd define "piloting skill" to include (something that doesn't appear to be identified, making meaningful discussion on the issue of skill vs. equipment moderately dubious): target selection, flying/maneuvering (including flight speed/throttle), positioning and spacing, selection and timing of clickies (what to click and when to click it). Of course, actual equipment/build determines what clickies are available in the first place, so the two are inexorably tied together.
Finally, it's probably not a static condition. Some equipment/build combinations are more aligned with how any specific player plays. Some folks probably like to zip around with FAW/Pedal to the Metal/beams, weaving in and out of enemies. Even if they had a cannon build with higher potential dps, they probably wouldn't perform as well because it's simply not the way they play the game.
The proposed test seems structured to prove that skill does not play a big role. Granted, there is an argument for the confounding effect of pugs in something like ISA or HSE (one or two other very high dps players makes a glass cannon build more likely to survive than if the rest of the team is low dps and it turns into a slog).
In the end, I'm not clear what would be proven given the constraints. Whether there is or is not a lot of dps variability, so...what then? There are literally thousands of videos on youtube that go into great detail on the build being used. Whatever equipment is or is not accessible to any given player will remain so. Even if hundreds of data points were collected, it still would not have sufficient precision to be able to pinpoint differences outside a very specific situation, not reflecting real in-game situations (no one is going to be doing queues with that build). Whatever competitive advantages or disadvantages exist due to equipment will not change.
Except for people like Spencer and Felisean, who can wring out 200K DPS using only Warp Core Breach, I think it's reasonable to say that the people who claim "It's skill, not gear" are just as wrong as the people who claim the opposite.
While both Spencer and Felisean are undoubtedly good players, neither of them can do 200k DPS using only a WCB.
But given it was RTF who made this post, I'm not even expecting any intelligence...
A major part of the issue here is (at least in my opinion) is thinking of "gear" and "skill" as 2 unique and independent things. Part "skill" is picking the right gear for your playstyle anyway.
My suggestion for testing "skill" versus "gear" would be to make a Foundry Project (once it's back up obviously) specifically for that purpose that would remove all map based variables then have the same person test it as many times as possible to remove any random variance from the test and focus on signifigant changes.
Having less then a hundred random people do the test once or twice proves nothing really, the test sample is too small and it would be easy to confuse random variance for what ever reason to with signigant differences.
If one is seriously about testing something like this, it must be done with patience and with an objective mindstate, also for the best results you want targets that survive the initial volley (a "target dummy" that can't be destroyed would ideal but sadly we haven't got those).
Even if we assume the OP wants to test this in good faith, the proposed test has too flaws that would invalidate the results to be of any practical use either way.
Except for people like Spencer and Felisean, who can wring out 200K DPS using only Warp Core Breach, I think it's reasonable to say that the people who claim "It's skill, not gear" are just as wrong as the people who claim the opposite.
Its a combination of both. However skill is hugely important take yourself and a formula one race driver and put yourselves in identical cars and have a race around a track that the formula one driver has raced dozen of times in this game its ISA for example. He might have the same car as you, but because he knows the track he is going to leave you in the dust. Why ? because he knows every turn/every bend/when to brake on a corner, when to accelerate into a corner or away from a corner, when to change up or down gears, He knows when to execute XYZ to get the most out of his car.
That is what the OP is missing in his one man crusade against the Evil DPSER's
They know when to
1. Activate weapon buffing abilities
2. Debuffing Abilities
3. Ideal distance to target and position to hit the hardest. Piloting
Just because you have the gear doesn't mean spamming spacebar is going to get you the same numbers as a player who knows these things.
With that said i'm out of this thread its got far more attention that it warrant's
Hello rubber banding my old friend, time to bounce around the battlezone again, where are all my bug reports going?, out of love with this game I am falling, As Cryptic fail to acknowledge a problem exists, Shakes an angry fist, And from Support all I'm hearing are the sounds of silence.
Bottom line here is there are just too many variables. I could be the worst pilot in the world with the best gear or vice versa. Knowing one was better than the other still doesn't change anything. I will still be trying my best or just go afk.
Since you guys can't debate civilly and this thread was going nowhere /closed
"Someone once told me that time was a predator that stalked us all our lives. I rather believe that time is a companion who goes with us on the journey and reminds us to cherish every moment, because it will never come again." - Jean Luc Picard in Star Trek Generations
Comments
> lordsteve1 wrote: »
>
> Well I got one cannot partake in this test. I have no slots for new toons and im sure as hell not deleting one or buying a slot. [...]
>
>
>
>
> Maybe you can afford an email address to create a new account. But then again, these things are expensive.
NO.
Look buddy,
If YOU want to create a revolution in how players measure performance and get us all using some fancy new solo parsing map to give data to compare then YOU need to come up with the goods.
Thus far all you’ve done is whinge about gear and parses and skill not being important and demanding we all go and make new characters or accounts to test out a theory. You’ve not even attempted to find a common ground we can all agree on or use for what you wish.
So how about you cut the nonsense and just listen the the players posting here who undersysnd the game mechanics and are at the top 1% of the skill tree. Those guys are telling you what you are asking for here if you take your head out of you TRIBBLE to actually listen.
Let's everyone calm down, please.
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I'd pay for that slot for you if I thought it would it help make the OP understand the difference between gear and skill. Or just for the fun of letting you embarrass him elsewhere other than on the forums.
Hello rubber banding my old friend, time to bounce around the battlezone again, where are all my bug reports going?, out of love with this game I am falling, As Cryptic fail to acknowledge a problem exists, Shakes an angry fist, And from Support all I'm hearing are the sounds of silence.
the character slot thing wouldn't be an issue there
or is Tribble still restricted in some way I'm not aware of?
This whole exercise of yours is obtuse. The evidence is already there. Anyone that has made the dps or elite content climb has gone through this already, and seen how much of their gains come from nothing but learning to fly, learning to trigger abilities at optimal times, and learning to quit making excuses for the personal human variable. In other words, you can actually track your improvements based purely on developing skill.
In turn, that knowledge gained has been freely shared and offered, with entire websites and reddit subs dedicated to helping people move up that climb a bit easier. It sure helped me over the past year of climbing, and anecdotally, one of the very first things I was told was the gear was secondary to learning how to pilot. True then, true now.
If you'd spend as much time actually doing it, instead of whinging on the forums about it, you'd already have all the data you need.
69k
and
Hard to see a pattern, I'm afraid.
You've nailed it. soph's trying to stack the deck by minimizing complexity, which would be fine in other circumstances, but he intends to make a point about the performance disparity in end-game PvE. (A note to the moderator who said this thread has gone downhill quickly: it already went downhill. This is a continuation of soph's performance in another thread.)
If we're all playing with the same crippled boff loadout and (lack of) CDR management tools, then the skill gap will be restricted severely, whereas in end-game queues the performance ceiling skyrockets for someone who knows how to take full advantage of ability synergies, manage cooldowns, etc. A less experienced or skilled player will lag a great deal in comparison, even if he has exactly the same end-game build.
This is why I often see people in builds that are capable of 100k+ struggle to hit 20k. There's nothing wrong with those people; they can learn, but the game teaches them nothing, and there's an enormous complexity increase at the end of the leveling progression.
Likewise, the importance of positioning is diminished on a build that has no coherent weapon scheme. In an end-game context, good players separate themselves by maintaining a higher firing time on target. Cryptic's default weapon loadouts exist to show the player what's equippable, not to show him how to play. Where do you even begin to find optimal positioning for a build that mixes two torps (fore and aft), regular beam arrays, and dual cannons? Presumably you're just supposed to fly in circles in the hope that all of your weapons get their turn to attack.
If you want to make a canon build mixing cannons, a torp, and omni arrays, I can do that for you, and it'll perform extremely well, but this? This is just wanton self-gimping.
The funny part is that some of us might be inclined to play along with soph's little experiment, if he'd shown the slightest bit of willingness to meet us halfway: after spending page after page whining that people's ISA scores are too high (and arguing for a DPS cap), he refused to even run the map once himself for comparison purposes. Thus he's comparing his own performance to a bunch of other people's scores in a different context, and using that uninformed comparison to argue for wholesale changes to the game. Remember his refusal to run a 3-minute parse the next time he complains that people are making excuses for not running his dopey little test, which features all sorts of benchmarking no-nos like high travel time and enemies that can be one-shot.
In any case, as you can see when he asks us to "just beat his score," this testing scheme isn't an attempt at empirical purity; this is about him, proving that the elitist DPSers aren't that much better than he is. Of course if he just posted his build in the appropriate channels and/or asked for help with his keybinds/ability rotations/positioning, then any number of us would be happy to help. But he doesn't want to get better; he wants to tear everyone else down instead.
STO Builds Wiki
U.S.S. Pale Horse, a Jem'Hadar Warship build
Rough comparison of different damage types on high-end cannon builds
Wrong. There are 15,405 data points available. They are just in a different pool you think you're too special to play in. It's called ISA, I know you've heard of it. Funny thing is, there's lots of data there you can compare to.
The point has already been proven, thousands of times. But no, everyone should snap to attention to prove themselves to random disgruntled internet poster sophlogimo. The existing benchmarks aren't good enough! Let's instead do this completely unvetted tutorial mission that eliminates 2/3rds of the game's complexity! The arrogance is stunning.
And LOL at having a tantrum over my obvious joke with the numbers. This is all you did in the other thread - ignoring any substantive argument, either taking words out of context to make yourself look better, or whining that you're being victimized. We've all tried being nice to you, to no avail - but it is kind of you to prove my point, in this latest post, by detailing all of your insecurities and resentments with respect to DPSers in STO. "Domination games," hahaha, seriously?
Why don't you answer Jay's post (@alcaatraz)? That dude's forgotten more than you'll ever know about STO's mechanics, and in both threads he's approached you with an unfailingly polite and reasonable tone. He's willing to discuss the merits of your proposed test in a constructive way, but that's not good enough, apparently. No, the narrative is ISA bad, and anything soph proposes off the cuff is good. (Remember, your original proposal was a Delta Quadrant patrol, but that doesn't work for newbie Jem toons, so the tutorial it is! So so much thought you've put into this.)
STO Builds Wiki
U.S.S. Pale Horse, a Jem'Hadar Warship build
Rough comparison of different damage types on high-end cannon builds
Of course, but no one is claiming that.
Obviously Gear is a big part of it, otherwise we wouldn't be dumping all our resources into getting Mark XV Gold items, lock box ships, lobi gear, expensive traits, etc.
Gear is obviously a part of it, a big part of it.. it's just not the only part.
(flame/troll comments removed)
Seems like it's not that either group is "wrong" as such. Rather, the answer more likely varies. At lower dps (let's say for illustrative purposes less than 20K), equipment matters more than skill - as I hypothesized earlier, less skill-based performance discrimination potential. At higher dps (Illustrative: 120K+), top gear is a given, so skill becomes the key differentiator that drives differences between 200K and 150K and 120K. It probably looks more like a rectangle cut from bottom left to top right corners with the left side equipment-dps and the right side skill-dps.
Here, I'd define "piloting skill" to include (something that doesn't appear to be identified, making meaningful discussion on the issue of skill vs. equipment moderately dubious): target selection, flying/maneuvering (including flight speed/throttle), positioning and spacing, selection and timing of clickies (what to click and when to click it). Of course, actual equipment/build determines what clickies are available in the first place, so the two are inexorably tied together.
Finally, it's probably not a static condition. Some equipment/build combinations are more aligned with how any specific player plays. Some folks probably like to zip around with FAW/Pedal to the Metal/beams, weaving in and out of enemies. Even if they had a cannon build with higher potential dps, they probably wouldn't perform as well because it's simply not the way they play the game.
The proposed test seems structured to prove that skill does not play a big role. Granted, there is an argument for the confounding effect of pugs in something like ISA or HSE (one or two other very high dps players makes a glass cannon build more likely to survive than if the rest of the team is low dps and it turns into a slog).
In the end, I'm not clear what would be proven given the constraints. Whether there is or is not a lot of dps variability, so...what then? There are literally thousands of videos on youtube that go into great detail on the build being used. Whatever equipment is or is not accessible to any given player will remain so. Even if hundreds of data points were collected, it still would not have sufficient precision to be able to pinpoint differences outside a very specific situation, not reflecting real in-game situations (no one is going to be doing queues with that build). Whatever competitive advantages or disadvantages exist due to equipment will not change.
While both Spencer and Felisean are undoubtedly good players, neither of them can do 200k DPS using only a WCB.
But given it was RTF who made this post, I'm not even expecting any intelligence...
U.S.S. Buteo Regalis - Brigid Multi-Mission Surveillance Explorer build
R.R.W. Ri Maajon - Khopesh Tactical Dreadnought Warbird build
My Youtube channel containing STO videos.
My suggestion for testing "skill" versus "gear" would be to make a Foundry Project (once it's back up obviously) specifically for that purpose that would remove all map based variables then have the same person test it as many times as possible to remove any random variance from the test and focus on signifigant changes.
Having less then a hundred random people do the test once or twice proves nothing really, the test sample is too small and it would be easy to confuse random variance for what ever reason to with signigant differences.
If one is seriously about testing something like this, it must be done with patience and with an objective mindstate, also for the best results you want targets that survive the initial volley (a "target dummy" that can't be destroyed would ideal but sadly we haven't got those).
Even if we assume the OP wants to test this in good faith, the proposed test has too flaws that would invalidate the results to be of any practical use either way.
Its a combination of both. However skill is hugely important take yourself and a formula one race driver and put yourselves in identical cars and have a race around a track that the formula one driver has raced dozen of times in this game its ISA for example. He might have the same car as you, but because he knows the track he is going to leave you in the dust. Why ? because he knows every turn/every bend/when to brake on a corner, when to accelerate into a corner or away from a corner, when to change up or down gears, He knows when to execute XYZ to get the most out of his car.
That is what the OP is missing in his one man crusade against the Evil DPSER's
They know when to
1. Activate weapon buffing abilities
2. Debuffing Abilities
3. Ideal distance to target and position to hit the hardest. Piloting
Just because you have the gear doesn't mean spamming spacebar is going to get you the same numbers as a player who knows these things.
With that said i'm out of this thread its got far more attention that it warrant's
Hello rubber banding my old friend, time to bounce around the battlezone again, where are all my bug reports going?, out of love with this game I am falling, As Cryptic fail to acknowledge a problem exists, Shakes an angry fist, And from Support all I'm hearing are the sounds of silence.
Star Trek Online volunteer Community Moderator